While Oracle audits TikTok’s algorithms, the company is facing a class action lawsuit that alleges an alarming degree of surveillance from the company.
The class action lawsuit (PDF) is being brought by Michael Katz-Lacabe, Jennifer Golbeck and Johnny Ryan. The involvement of Ryan is notable as he is a senior fellow for the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.
This organisation was established by Kader Asmal in 1976 and seeks to “promote human rights, protect civil liberties, recover them where they have been removed, and enlarge them where they have been diminished”.
The lawsuit alleges that through its course of business, Oracle has created a network that is able to track and record the personal information of millions of people in real-time.
Through a vast network of products and systems, the lawsuit alleges that Oracle is able to sell targeted advertising to marketers using detailed dossiers on as many as five billion people. This includes highlighting groups of people that may be more likely to purchase a product based on past behaviour.
The ICCL points to one of Oracle’s properties, BlueKai as a main driver of this data collection. In 2020, TechCrunch reported that BlueKai was tracking one percent of all web traffic which is an alarming amount of data to have access to.
The surveillance in and of itself is alarming, but should this data fall into the wrong hands, it could put folks in real danger.
“Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity: for example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site,” the ICCL said in a statement.
The class action lawsuit takes some interesting approaches including arguing that Oracle has breached Katz-Lacabe and the California subclass’ right to a reasonable expectation of privacy. This isn’t true for all plaintiffs but it’s a very interesting argument to see.
In its prayer for relief, the class action asks the court to award plaintiffs damages for the data collection Oracle has overseen. More interesting, however, is the request to award restitution “of Oracle’s ill-gotten gains, revenues, earnings, or profits that it derived, in whole or in part, from its unlawful collection and use of Class members’ personal data, in an amount according to proof at trial”.
Finally, the plaintiffs are asking that the court restrain Oracle from intercepting, tracking or compiling the personal information of class members. This likely won’t bring an end to all data collection from the firm but it could inspire other lawsuits that slowly suffocate that side of the business.
“Oracle has violated the privacy of billions of people across the globe. This is a Fortune 500 company on a dangerous mission to track where every person in the world goes, and what they do. We are taking this action to stop Oracle’s surveillance machine,” Ryan said in a statement.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
